Friday, 3 August 2012

A Supplicant, one who supplicates, is a term applied to humble petitioners, and in particular to University of Oxford students who have qualified but not yet been admitted into their degree.
At both Oxford and Cambridge, students are presented during the degree ceremony with a form of words that begins with the Latin verb "supplicant". The Cambridge text is:

"Those men and women whose names the Registrary has today posted in the arcade beside the Senate-House and which the Vice-Chancellor has not deleted beg your reverences that they may proceed to the degree for which each has properly applied."

However, these students are referred to as graduands at Cambridge and most universities other than Oxford. The current online edition of the Oxford English Dictionary lists graduand citing usage from 1882 and 1890 and etymological roots of the gerundive of the medieval Latin graduare "to graduate".